Gilbert's economy and reputation received a big boost Wednesday with the news that Banner Health and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center will open a $90 million cancer hospital on the Banner Gateway Medical Center campus.

With the housing market mired in a historic slump, a survey from real estate Web site Zillow.com shows that nearly 22 percent of American homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

ASU-RSI: Preliminary Data Offer Glimmer of Hope for Plunging Phoenix Home Prices Arizona real estate markets tend to swing wildly. During boom periods, home prices accelerate precipitously, but when the bubble bursts, residential values sometimes slink all the way back to the price level at the start of cyclical upturn. However, the tend line is different in this recession -- things are actually much worse, as housing prices in the Phoenix metropolitan area have overshot the beginning of the cycle mark, according to the latest data from the Arizona State University-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI). But while the news of home value does seem to be grim, there are nuggets of hope in the preliminary ASU-RSI data as well.

Forecasters See Economy Turning Positive in Second Half of 2009 Economy-watchers will find out just how poorly the economy performed in the first quarter of 2009 on Wednesday, April 29. That's when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases the advance report on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Expectations are that the annualized decrease will be at least 6.0 percent, as bad as the fourth quarter of 2008. But once the economy gets past the first quarter carnage, the consensus view among economists is that Q2 will bring a more modest decrease of 2 to 3 percent. Moving into the second half of 2009, analysts look for growth as measured by GDP to turn positive. The Round Number Forecast from the W. P. Carey School of Business, released April 16, is projecting that GDP will decrease by 3.0 percent for all of 2009 and increase by 2.0 percent next year.

More than 150 small and medium-sized U.S. banks are currently failing and expected to close by the fourth quarter as bad commercial real estate loans threaten their viability, according to an analysis by the Oakland, Calif.-based research firm Foresight Analytics.

The rate of projected bank closures this year is running six times higher than the 25 failures that occurred in 2008. The volatile lending climate marks a stark contrast from 2007 when only three banks closed.

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I'm Nick Miner. I have been working in Commercial Real Estate since 1998 and have completed over $225 million dollars of sales and leasing activity in my career. In September 2012, I made the move to ORION Investment Real Estate and am currently a Senior Vice President - Investments. How can I help you?